


The keys to the kingdom got locked inside the kingdom

by SomeEnchantedEve



Series: the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, F/M, Falling In Love, Preseries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 03:04:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/819228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeEnchantedEve/pseuds/SomeEnchantedEve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a failed Rebellion, Catelyn and Ned must try and build a family and life together in exile. </p><p>(Written for the <a href="http://asoiafkinkmeme.livejournal.com">ASOIAF Kink Meme</a>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The keys to the kingdom got locked inside the kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the ASOIAF Kink Meme! The title comes from Josh Ritter's 'Girl in the War.' All comments/kudos are greatly appreciated and loved!! :D

Rhaegar Targaryen’s mercy only extends so far, even for the benefit of his beloved Lyanna. In the end, it stretches only so far as the coast of Lys. The triumphant king upon the Iron Throne may move heaven and earth for his lady love, but he will not suffer rebels and traitors in his realm. The war ends with Robert slain upon the Trident, with Lord Arryn and Lord Tully executed for treason, and Ned and his wife and babe are exiled to the Free Cities. 

That, his sister tells him with tears in her grey eyes when she comes to bid him farewell, is mercy. 

Lys is not where they were meant to land; their ship had been bound for Pentos before being blown off course by a wayward storm. The captain stares at Ned blankly when he asks when they shall set sail again, and he realizes that the king of the Seven Kingdoms paid only enough for fare to the Free Cities for the traitors. The captain and crew care not which of the Cities it is, and, like so much unwanted cargo, Ned and his family are to be unloaded wherever they may land. 

There is coin sewn into the hem of Catelyn’s gown, coin that she and her loyal septa hastily secured beneath the lining before Catelyn had left Riverrun. But it is Westerosi gold, undervalued by the Lyseni, and Ned finds only one ship who will take the lot for transport to Pentos – out of the goodness of his heart, the captain claims in the Common Tongue, his lips curled into a mocking sneer. He adds something then in Low Valyrian; Ned does not understand the language, but he understands well enough the way the captain leers at Catelyn, and that is enough to turn them around.

Ned tells himself it is for the best; to spend their last coins to move from one strange city to another, to arrive penniless and friendless, would be beyond foolish. He has already led his wife into disgrace, tied her to his treason – he refuses to make his family homeless and hungry, as well. The coin is enough to get them a room and a meal at a local inn, and the next morning Ned begins to look for work. 

It would be easiest to serve as a sellsword, but Ned has never had a taste for battle and war has soured it further. He cannot kill for coin, fight battles he does not believe in, slaughter men who are not his enemies. He finds an armoury willing to take him instead, to teach him to weld instead of wield. It is honest work, he can tell himself that – while a sellsword’s skill may be bought for evil and good alike, all steel is the same at the beginning, new and unstained, and there is always the chance that the weaponry he forges will be used honorably. His work is poor at the start, especially compared with the skill of the Lyseni, who blend colors in the Valyrian steel to make rippling rainbows of flashing color. Even when he was only the second son of House Stark, he had been raised to rule a holdfast, he had not been trained for trade work. 

The other smiths may mock his crude armour but they teach and train him, as well, and thus he improves. It is not the first time that Ned must reimagine his future, and it is easier than he thought to humble himself to a commoner’s work. 

Lys is hot and strange, the air thick with heavy perfumes and the Lyseni clad in wisps of silk the likes of which Ned has never seen, even in Dorne. He averts his eyes from the women, and they laugh at him for that, the women and his fellow smiths alike. At times he wonders if Pentos would have seemed as foreign to him, sometimes he even allows himself to think of Braavos, far to the north, and the life they could have made there. It would not have been so damnably hot, and there would have been a sept for Catelyn, and perhaps even a weirwood for him to pray by, and he thinks he would have liked that. Instead, all there is for them in Lys is a small cottage by the rocky shore, tiny and not particularly well made. Ned tries to repair the structure, but he is no builder as certainly as he is no smith, and he wakes each morning and lays his head down each night with his heart heavy with the shame of failure. 

At times, he can barely look upon Catelyn, when he thinks of what meager circumstances he has brought her to, what dishonor he has wrought upon her. She is a highborn lady, meant for greater things; she is made to run a castle with a legion of ladies, stewards, and servants at her call. Since Robb’s birth, Catelyn had taken a larger part in his daily care than many noble ladies of similar standing would, but back in Riverrun, there had still been nursemaids to attend to the infant. Here there is no one and nothing but the three of them within the four crude walls of their one room home, and while Ned is taught the work of a blacksmith, Catelyn has no one to tell her the way to cook, to wash their linens, to clean, and so she must teach herself. 

Sometimes Ned wonders if it would have been better had he died in the war; Catelyn’s sister, Jon’s widow, serves as one of Lyanna’s ladies, and her young brother Edmure is a ward of the court. They are little more than hostages to Brynden Blackfish’s good behavior until Edmure comes of age, but at least they are living in accordance with their station. He wonders if Catelyn would have preferred that. 

“It is better this way,” Catelyn whispers, as though she can read his thoughts, when she receives one of her sister’s infrequent letters, a letter in which each word had been carefully chosen with the expectation that they would be read and dissected and perhaps punished. “He would have taken Robb from us, he would have kept him as punishment. At least here we are together, and we are free of the king.” At the very thought, she holds their son closer to her breast, and Ned watches as Robb reaches out with his fat fists to pull at Catelyn’s loose red hair. 

Vaguely he remembers the intricate coils and curls she had worn in Riverrun, the handiwork of a skilled ladies’ maid. There is no one to dress her hair here, and so she wears it long over her shoulders and down her back, the same color of the sun as it dips beneath the horizon outside their door. Their first trip into the market when they had first arrived in Lys, an old woman had leaned out of her stall and seized a lock of it, tugging hard so that Catelyn had cried out and Ned’s hand had gone to his dagger upon instinct. 

“She will pay for it,” the Lysene man at her side had explained, speaking in the Common Tongue with a heavy accent, while the old woman barked at them in Valyrian. The old woman had measured the weight of Catelyn’s hair in her palm, and weighed a coin purse in the opposite hand. 

Ned had hated the way Catelyn had looked at him then, with grim determination in her eyes laced with immeasurable sorrow. “No,” he had blurted. “No, my lady, there is no need for such madness.” For his folly, his wife had been forced to give up all that she knew and held dear; he could never ask her to hack the beautiful hair from her head, it had been a price he refused to let her pay. 

He knows she would have paid it, had he asked her. Catelyn is a brave woman, more than he could have ever hoped, more than he deserves. She does not complain of her discomfort, not when her white hands become rough and cracked from scrubbing and mending and clumsy efforts at cooking, and not when her delicate pale skin, so similar in complexion to the Lyseni but unused to the heat of the scorching sun after years of a Westerosi winter, blisters red and peels. Ned draws her a cool bath to help soothe the pain and she submerges into the metal basin with her face twisted in agony, but still she does not curse him, does not ascribe blame. They are still little more than strangers but Ned thinks he could love her for that alone. She sells the fine blue gown she wore upon the ship, the last trappings of home where she had been the daughter of Riverrun, and she uses the coin to buy Lyseni silks and light cottons for them both, more fitting to the climate. 

The small cracks he sees in her immeasurably strong front upon occasion only serve to further tender his heart towards her. At times, he catches her weeping, though always when she thinks he cannot see, and always while amidst one chore or another – she never allows herself the luxury of wallowing in self-pity, she may bend and quiver but never breaks. It seems to happen most often when she is rocking Robb to sleep, his fat fist splayed across her breast and his face smooth and peaceful. Their son, at least, will never know any other sort of life, will never know that he should have been the heir of Winterfell. When the world is silent and still, Ned sees the few drops fall from Catelyn’s long eyelashes to land upon Robb’s downy head. In those moments, he wishes he had the right words of comfort to offer her, that his arms could serve as a refuge. He wonders what Brandon would have said to her. 

It is a foolish thought; had Brandon lived, there would be no need to comfort Catelyn in exile. Had Brandon lived, she would be the lady of Winterfell, as she deserved to be. 

\--

They may have arrived at Lys still nearly strangers, but proximity and loneliness forces them closer more quickly than they might have come together in Westeros. In Winterfell, they would have each kept their own chambers; the castle is large enough that they could have gone days without seeing one another at all, had they chosen to do so. They have no such option here; there is only one cot for a bed in their tiny cottage, barely big enough to accommodate them both, and a roughly made cradle for Robb lined with blankets Catelyn stitched herself in Riverrun, embroidered with leaping trouts and running wolves, reminders of the people they are supposed to be. 

Here in exile, they have little choice but to get to know each other quickly; they are all the other has of home, in this foreign land, and they must work together to keep their little family afloat. It is hard to think of Catelyn as a stranger when she and Robb are the most familiar people in Ned’s world, when he spends each night holding her close against his body so that neither of them tumbles from the cot onto the floor. He finds the heat of the room, of the _city_ nearly intolerable, but he enjoys the feeling of her bare skin against his, the cool brush of her light silk shift against the rough calluses of his hand. She sighs softly and interlocks their fingers together over her belly, and Ned wonders why she does not hate him, when she has every reason in the world to do so. 

He has never been one to voice his feelings, nor his troubles, but it is easier to speak plainly when they are plunged into darkness, when he can only make out the top of her head tucked beneath his chin, her back pressed to his chest. It is one thing he does not miss of Westeros, the courtly games that must so often be played, the deceptions that he has no patience for. Here they are no lord and lady, they are merely a man and woman, and there is no reason for lies, to dance around their true thoughts. He murmurs an apology into her thick auburn hair and she turns to face him.

He can see her brow furrowing even in the darkness. “What are you sorry for?” she asks. 

Ned sighs, and shifts to stare up at the ceiling. He traces the cracks in the plaster with his eyes, and wonders if it will hold up when the next storm rolls in. “This is not the sort of life you should have,” he says. “Were you any other man’s wife, you would be safe in Westeros.” _Were you Brandon’s wife, you would not be brought to such ruin._

Catelyn’s fingers brush soothingly over his bare chest, and he studiously avoids her eye. “This is not the sort of life _any_ of us should have,” she points out. 

“I know,” he replies. “But the fault is mine.” 

“No,” she answers swiftly, so quickly that he instinctively twists his head to glance at her, wondering if she has turned similar thoughts over in her head in nights past, nights where they would lie in silence. “It is not.” 

His lips twist into a bitter smile. “They called it Robert’s Rebellion, but the war was as much mine as it was his,” he says. “And in the end, it was for naught.” He closes his eyes, and Lyanna’s grieved grey eyes flicker through his mind, _oh, Ned, I am so sorry,_ she had cried, but her tears and sorrows had not set the world to right. 

“It was my father’s war, too,” Catelyn replies fiercely. “And Jon Arryn’s, and yes, Brandon and your father as well. Their king murdered them and then called for your head for sharing their blood.” Her hand slides up his chest, grasping under his chin, her fingernails scratching lightly against his beard. “There has been enough misplaced blame in this war, Ned. It is not your doing that brought us here. And it may not last forever. We are not friendless in the Seven Kingdoms. Rhaegar may yet pardon you.” She tilts her head, considering briefly. “Or if he were to die before your sister, she would be the regent for their son, and certainly she would let us home.” 

Unbidden, a small smile flickers briefly across his lips. “Pondering the death of the king – you speak treason, Catelyn.” 

She snorts lightly in derision, rolling to her side once more so that he can curl against her. “Then it is a good thing I am already named a traitor,” she answers wryly. 

\--

Her strength and fortitude shame him, and though he hates to see her pain, it is almost a relief when she finally allows him to see her weep. It is after three difficult moons in Lys, of scrimping and trying to keep from falling into debt. Ned works long hours, helping with the accounting books hours after the forge is closed. It is here that he has the greatest success – his hands may not have been trained in such fine workmanship, but the Lyseni smiths cannot match his education, and the sums come easy to him. It is the best way to earn extra coin, and he seizes the opportunity eagerly, hoping to earn enough to hire a girl to help Catelyn during the day. For now, it means that Catelyn is home alone longer than ever tending to the babe, but he tells himself that the extra set of hands will make the momentarily strain worth it. 

Ned comes home from the armoury late one night and Robb is screaming, loud enough that he picks up his pace as he approaches the door, concerned that something may be amiss. When he opens the door, Catelyn is pacing the length of the room with Robb on her shoulder, rubbing his back, though it seems to bring the babe no relief as he clutches his fists over his tiny body and wails. “I think his belly pains him. He has been crying all day,” she says when she turns to see Ned there, and Ned thinks she has never looked so weary. His arms ache from a long day of hard labor, his back aches from bending over the forge, and his eyes sting from squinting at figures in dim candlelight, but at the sight of her face, he crosses the room to take their son from her arms. 

“He will tire soon enough,” Ned assures her, and her lips tremble as she stares at him with wide, glassy eyes. 

Catelyn deliriously turns her gaze to the table, blinking in surprise at the emptiness she finds there. “I will find you something to eat,” she murmurs, and Ned shakes his head, catching her arm as she goes to move past him. 

“I am not hungry,” he lies. “Sit. Rest a minute.” 

An hour or so later, after Robb cries himself to sleep on Ned’s shoulder, a few, silent tears come, spilling down Catelyn’s cheeks, a strange mixture of exhaustion, frustration, and relief. He still does not know what to say to her, and so he reaches out to awkwardly cup her cheek, to clumsily wipe the dampness there away with his thumb. 

“Forgive me,” she whispers to him, determined to not disturb Robb’s hard-won slumber. “I do not mean to…I am only tired.” 

He shifts Robb in his arms, preparing to lay him in the cradle. “Let’s to bed, then,” he tells his wife gently. 

When he puts his son to bed and snuffs out the candles, he curls beside Catelyn on their cot as he has every night since arriving in Lys. Her body trembles against his own, and her cheeks are still damp to the touch when he reaches over to brush her hair back off her face. “Gods!” she exclaims in irritation. “I don’t even know why I’m crying.” 

“It’s all right,” he assures her. There are other words he should give her – assurances that he understands her fear, her loneliness, her longing for home and family – but they all sound patronizing and so he keeps them to himself. “It’s all right, Cat.” 

The sound that escapes her lips is half-laugh, half-sob, and when she twists to face him, she gives him a watery smile. “’Cat.’ You’ve never called me that before.” 

He smiles back, and she closes her eyes. 

She does not ask him to – she would never ask him to – but after that night he tries to arrive home earlier most evenings than he had the last few weeks. It takes longer to save coin, but some of the brightness returns to Cat’s eyes, and to Ned, that is a trade worth making. 

\--

Letters from home are rare. 

There is the occasional letter from Cat’s uncle in Riverrun, and these letters are the most familial, the most concerned for her welfare and wellbeing. It warms Ned’s heart to see her read them, to see the way her lips curl up in a faint smile. Rarer still are letters from her sister, and those are always carefully worded – and carefully read, before they are allowed to leave the capital, Ned assumes. Her brother only scrawls his name at the end of Lysa’s letters, and though Lysa assures Cat that Edmure is well, that they are both _so very well_ , Ned knows that Cat worries, can tell by the way she worries her bottom lip between her teeth. 

Even rarer than those are the letters from Benjen, and Ned suspects the loyalist ‘guests’ who remain in Winterfell at the king’s behest make sure that many of his brother’s letters do not leave the North. By the contents of Benjen’s letters, Ned is even more certain that his own responses are never allowed to reach Benjen’s hands. 

He worries for Benjen, about the weight of responsibility that never should have come to rest upon his young brother’s shoulders – the rule of the North under the watchful gaze of a suspicious king – though Lyanna’s letters claim that Benjen is well, is growing and thriving in his new role, that she is able to visit him upon occasion. 

Lyanna’s letters are more frequent than his brother’s, and more open and honest, less careful to choose the safest words. _I suppose Rhaegar is not so suspicious as to demand to read his queen’s letters,_ Ned thinks sourly when a letter comes in Lyanna’s neat script. He knows he should be touched – Lyanna hates to write, and the pages she sends to him are surely a testament of her love and her guilt – but he is instead left sour and angry every time he receives word from her. 

Each one starts the same way – assurances that she continues to put his cause before the king, promises that someday soon, he will be allowed to return to the Seven Kingdoms, apologies for her hasty choices and the sorrow she has brought upon their family. They slowly move to more mundanely happy matters – she reports on her son, Jon, and his progress; she details a royal trip to the Reach and how she and the king are considering little Margaery as a potential bride for their prince. The chatter sets Ned’s teeth on edge, the apologies still ring hollow to him, and Lyanna’s letters go, unanswered, into the fire. 

“You will have to forgive her someday,” Cat murmurs to him as they watch his royal sister’s latest correspondence burn, and Ned can detect the hint of disapproval in her voice. Cat is a Tully through and through, raised on the tenants of _family, duty, honor._ Once the Starks had been the same, _the lone wolf dies while the pack survives_ \- it is what sent Brandon riding to King’s Landing after Lyanna, it is why Ned raised his banners. But Ned has a different pack to consider now, and he cannot help but hold onto his bitterness. 

“I know,” he murmurs – he loves Lya still, he _does_ , but all he can pen, when he sits down to reply, are the rebukes of a disappointed older brother, and so he does not reply to her at all. _I must forgive her, but I cannot do so today._

\--

For the first four moons, Ned and Cat do not lie together. 

It is a strange thing, Ned knows, and one without a true explanation. They are wed, and they know each other far better than they did those two weeks in Riverrun, the fortnight after their wedding when they made their son, a time that seems to belong to different people entirely. They are exhausted, he tells himself when they sleep side by side each night, weary of body and troubled of mind, but he had wed and bed her in the midst of fighting a war, and so the excuse sounds thin even to himself. 

It is not through lack of desire, of that he is certain. Catelyn is a beautiful woman, and at times he can barely look at her and the way her wispy, thin Lyseni silks cling to the curves of her body without flushing red. The blisters she suffered when they first arrived have healed, and instead, a thousand tiny sunspots now dust her shoulders and collarbone, scattering down into the valley between her breasts. He traces the ones on the back of her neck, sometimes, after she has fallen asleep, but he dares no further than that. Some mornings, he wakes to her leg tucked between his thighs, her fingers hot against the bare skin of his belly, and he has to roll away before she wakes to find him hard against her hip. 

“Do I displease you?” she murmurs one such day, and he startles to find her awake. He glances over his shoulder to look at her, and finds her gazing back, her bright blue eyes still cloudy with sleep and a small frown creasing the corners of her lips. Her hair is wild on the pillow, around her shoulders, and her shift slips down her shoulder, revealing the creamy whiteness of the top of her breast. Ned swallows hard, respectfully averting his eyes, despite the absurdity he feels in doing so. 

“Never,” he answers honestly, and cautiously, she reaches for him, her hand skimming over his hip as she scoots closer to him on the bed, her thigh pressed flush to his. Her fingers brush down to the laces of his breeches, tugging lightly, and Ned inhales roughly. 

Cat props herself up on her elbow to look down at him, her gaze scrutinizing his face. “The king has punished us by sending us into exile,” she says softly. “Must we punish ourselves further by denying ourselves any sort of happiness?” 

Ned frowns now, considering her words. Does he mean it as further punishment for his treason, his refusal to lie with his wife? Would it be so terrible, to claim a bit of pleasure in the hardship that they have been dealt? Gently, he reaches up to brush her hair back, tracing along her hairline to rest his hand against the long column of her neck. “What if I get you with child?” he asks quietly. 

Catelyn shrugs. “I should like that.” She looks surprised even as the words leave her mouth, and after a moment, a small, secretive smile blooms across her face, lighting her up from the inside, making her more beautiful than ever. “I would like another babe to love,” she confesses softly. “As a girl I wanted a dozen babes of my own. Why should that be different now?” 

“To be born here? In exile?” Despondently, Ned gazes around the small cottage. _There would have been room for a dozen babes in Winterfell. Two dozen. As many as she would have liked, as many as I could give her._

At that, Cat sits up, and he follows suit. “I hope that we may someday return to the Seven Kingdoms,” she says softly. “But mayhaps we will not. In either case, we cannot wait until then to live.” With a fluid moment, she slides the silks from her body, and they puddle to the floor on the edge of their cot, leaving her sitting naked beside him. Her cheeks flush as he stares at her, transfixed, and despite the shyness that lingers in her eyes, she reaches for his hand, boldly bringing it to her breast. “Please, Ned,” she whispers. 

There is not much that Cat asks of him, and there is not much he can offer her. This, the one thing she desires from him, is not such a sacrifice. 

He caresses her gently, running his thumb over her nipple, watching it harden beneath his touch as she sighs and arches her back. Encouraged by the sound, he lowers his mouth to her other breast, to tease at it with his lips and tongue. The morning is hot, as they so often are, and he can taste the salt of her sweat on her skin, can feel the hot flush of her body. His cock twitches in response to the soft moan that escapes her lips, and he bears her down onto the bed. 

She watches him with heavily lidded eyes as he shucks his breeches down his legs, and he is struck anew by how beautiful she is, by her strength and will. He still cannot help but feel responsible and guilty for the trouble this marriage has brought to her door; but nor can he help but be glad of her company, certain that no other woman would bear it as well, no other wife would accept their lot so bravely. He does not love her, not quite yet, but there is a feeling of inevitability as he looks at her - _I will do so one day soon_. He may not deserve her – she is the type of woman made for men like Brandon, strong, handsome men who were born to be lords and leaders – but he is glad of her, and he needs her in the strange land. 

If he were a more eloquent man, he could tell her so. 

Cat sits up as he hesitates, reaching down to palm his cock now that he is free of his breeches. He kisses her lips, winding his fingers through the thick hair at the back of her head, moaning as her tongue darts out and meets his. He nips at her bottom lip before kissing her jaw, her throat, her collarbone, licking the hollow of her throat until she tips her head back and gasps, her hands grasping his jaw. Gently, he urges her again to her back, her thighs bracketing his body, her hands tracing over his back while her mouth brushes against his neck, her lips parted and her breath hot. She is wet when he dips his fingers between her legs, and he twists his fingers, teasing her gently. He would have continued thus, touching and stroking, but she tugs at him, pulling him down on top of her, and her hand wraps around his cock, guiding him inside her. Their bodies are slick with sweat already, and he sinks into her with little resistance. 

Cat whimpers in pleasure, a high, throaty sound, and her hand comes up to intertwine with his. It feels so sweet that he has to drop his forehead to rest against hers for a moment to keep from spilling like a green boy, and he wonders, deliriously, why they waited so long, why he sought to punish them further than they have already been punished. _It is time to start to live,_ he silently agrees with her assertion, and he kisses her again, warm and open-mouthed. 

He can think of few more pleasant ways to start. 

\--

Their daughter is born the next year, red all over, and the midwife from the village declares her as healthy as can be. Ned had not been present for the birth of his son, but he can still imagine how different this birth is. There are no ladies to wipe Cat’s brow or feed her honeyed wine, no maester to oversee an army of midwives, just the single woman who assists in all the births in the village and along the coast, and Ned himself, sitting in the bed behind Cat so she can brace herself against his chest, clutch her hands on his knees. In Winterfell, he would have been expected to wait outside until the bloody business was done, until Cat and the babe were fresh and clean, and here, he is the one to separate their girl from Cat’s body under the hawkish watch of the midwife’s eyes. 

“Sansa,” Cat declares, and she smiles at him with more joy on her face than he has seen since their ship landed upon the coast of Lys. Her hair is damp with sweat and plastered to her forehead; he brushes it back and presses a kiss to her temple. Outside, Ned can hear Robb laughing as the nursemaid that he has recently been able to hire frolics with him by the shallow, warm waters of the shore. 

In the years that pass, Ned remembers that day as one where many truths revealed themselves to him; that he loves his bravely stubborn wife, that there is room enough for children aplenty in their cottage and in his heart, and that together, they may make a home here – or elsewhere – yet.


End file.
